The City of Fairfax may have some funny ideas about what makes good urbanism, but for a small suburban jurisdiction they deserve credit for running a pretty darn good transit service. The CUE system operates a small fleet of buses running between Vienna Metro, downtown Fairfax, and George Mason University an average of every 8 minutes.

With frequent service and a built-in population of riders going between the Metro and GMU, CUE moves too many people for its existing 30-foot buses to crowd together. To solve the problem, the City ordered and recently took delivery of a batch of new, longer, higher capacity, low-floor buses. To up its green quotient, the City went with what will be the Washington region’s Northern Virginia’s first hybrid buses, which are even more clean than the natural gas vehicles run by several regional operators. The new buses, pictured below, also feature a nifty new paint scheme, which I’m proud to say I had a hand in designing.

The buses are currently undergoing testing at the City’s maintenance facility, but will begin full revenue service soon.

New CUE buses parked at their Fairfax maintenance yard.

In recent years the Town of Chevy Chase has turned itself into a regional laughingstock over its farcically obvious NIMBY opposition to the Purple Line. But how many Chevy Chase residents actually deserve to be laughed at?

At a recent Town Council public hearing to gauge support, 28 residents testified in favor of using Town money to sue Maryland over the Purple Line, while 21 testified against doing so. That’s a 57/43 percentage split, based on the people who feel strongly enough to show up in person to a meeting.

If I were one of those 43%, I’d be pretty upset that my government was preparing to spend $275 of my money ($750, 000 cost of lawsuit divided by 2, 726 total residents in the Town) on something I didn’t want them to fight in the first place.

Gaithersburg: Not so bad, but they still mandate a lot of driving.

After last Thursday’s post about Gaithersburg I was contacted by City Council members Cathy Drzyzgula and Jud Ashman, who claimed that their characterization in the linked-to Gazette story and subsequent BeyondDC post was inaccurate. At their request I watched the video of the public hearing in question. With more complete information, I have some thoughts to add to last week’s post:

1. The characterization of the Council as a whole and particularly Ms. Drzyzgula was indeed inaccurate. To the Council’s credit, they seem to recognize the importance of planning, value the principles of Smart Growth, and agree that the city should revisit its formulas for minimum parking. To Ms. Drzyzgula’s individual credit, she seems to be one of the Council’s stronger proponents of good urbanism, and I didn’t hear the statement attributed to her about Gaithersburg’s future as a car-driven community at any point in the meeting.

2. That having been said, the Council still exhibited plenty of examples of car-centric thinking. At one point the Mayor said “parking is one of those issues that really is quality of life; you need to have a parking space close to you.” Council Vice President Michael Sesma said he is “not sure we have the transportation resources necessary to convince people they don’t need the number of cars they have now” and later argued that parking minimums were important, lest neighborhoods near larger developments be burdened with overflow parking. A cars-first bias showed through even when Planning Commissioner Matt Hopkins voiced support for Smart Growth by saying that lower parking requirements would support the “social engineering” efforts by the city to increase walkability and transit use. The message in all of these statements is that driving for most trips is the natural way of things. In truth, there is nothing at all natural about driving everywhere; that only seems to be the case because regulations supporting (and funding) cars to the detriment of other living/transportation arrangements are so entrenched in law that overcoming them is extremely difficult. That brings me to my final point:

3. Despite the progressiveness of some on the Gaithersburg City Council, and despite 20 years as a center of New Urbanism, BeyondDC’s headline last Thursday was absolutely correct – Gaithersburg (and just about all of its peers in the world of local government) continues to legally mandate congestion by continuing to uphold laws that result in a driving-first community. Gaithersburg has gotten rid of some of those laws and is ahead of a lot of places in this region and nationally, but it still has a very long way to go. The good news is at least one person on the Gaithersburg City Council recognizes that – in an email exchange Councilman Ashman asked if I could identify places in the Gaithersburg code that unnaturally encourage driving. Watch for that in a future post.

Sign the petition asking elected officials to make streetcars a priority.

President Obama seems to have put most of the legislative agenda on hold for the summer in order to focus on health care reform. While there hasn’t necessarily been a whole lot of movement from HUD or the President’s Office of Urban Affairs, news about staffing and the direction he will presumably take continues to be positive.

Today’s example comes from the Seattle Times, which recently ran a story about Ron Sims, former King County executive and currently the new second-in-command at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The two key points to take from the article are that:

1. Sims record as a proponent of Smart Growth came up during his interview process with Obama and was a major reason for his selection for a job in HUD leadership.
2. When deciding where to live, Sims choose a home in one of Arlington’s famous TODs in part because of its history as a Smart Growth model.

There’s a story in this week’s Gazette about an infill proposal on the edge of downtown Gaithersburg. The developer is asking for a parking reduction from the city’s required minimums, because the site is within walking distance of a whole host of amenities and transit, and because the target demographic is young professionals interested in urban living.

The City Council’s response? To paraphrase Councilwoman Cathy Drzyzgula, “There is no evidence that Gaithersburg will not still be a car-driven community far into the future.”

With all due respect, Ms. Drzyzgula, this is why we plan. Gaithersburg can be whatever you want it to be, with the right set of regulations. If you continue to enact regulations that require developers to focus their buildings around cars (such as requirements for lots of parking), then your community will be a car-driven one forever. On the other hand, if you enact regulations that favor walking, then over time you’ll see a critical mass of walkable development and before too long your community will be a walkable one. These things don’t happen by accident; they happen by plan, according to the laws you as a community leader enact.

The really unfortunate thing here is that Gaithersburg has lost so much ground. It wasn’t that long ago that the Gaithersburg City Council was one of the more progressive in the country. Back in the 1990s it was developers asking to build car-centric suburbia and the Council pointing them towards more responsible forms. Thanks to the leadership of the Council then, Gaithersburg was transitioning quickly away from the cars-all-the-time model. Now, because the Council doesn’t seem to understand the value of planning, they continue to legally mandate congestion by requiring unnecessary parking and maintaining other regulations that subsidize driving and discourage anything else.

This is exactly what I was talking about two days ago. Americans don’t drive all the time by accident; they do so because we require them to with ridiculous laws that mandate driving be the dominant mode. It’s completely preposterous. The Gaithersburg City Council, which went through this whole debate years ago, should know better.

Update 8/28: Some of the characterizations in this post are inaccurate. Please see Three cheers for responsive government for more.

Most Americans outside the planning wonk world think about transportation in terms of roads. The TEA bill is a “highway” bill, the answer to any mobility or congestion problem is to make driving easier, etc. Even some who do wade into wonk territory maintain those (mistaken) ideas.

As someone who grew up in the suburbs and thought that way for a long time, it seems worthwhile to explain the thought process. Basically, it boils down to thinking that: “Most people drive for most trips, so we ought to focus on driving. Other alternatives like transit can be nice, but they’ll never solve much on their own because driving is the way normal people get around for most of their business”.

The statement is true so far as it goes; outside of maybe half a dozen major central cities most Americans *do* get around mostly by car these days. But that statement is only a surface-deep examination of the subject. The next level of sophistication would be to ask “Why is it that way?” Most suburbanites think the suburban way of life just happened. A couple of generations ago cars became widely available and easy to use, so everybody got one and now our driving culture is the natural way of things. So they think. In reality though, suburbia didn’t just happen. It was centrally planned, regulated, and heavily subsidized from the get-go. From zoning and red-lining to tax law to the Interstate Highway Act, American suburbia is one of the world’s greatest ever examples of social engineering. It never could have happened without absolutely tremendous institutional investment over the long term.

The fact is, suburbia happened by design. It wasn’t chance and it certainly wasn’t the free market. If we can help the roads-only crowd understand that, then they can make the logical leap forward that if we designed the system we have now, we can design a different one for the future.

Over the weekend Seattle became the latest American city with light rail rapid transit. The Central Link corridor comes complete with a downtown subway. Congrats!

Experimenting with Twitter integration. Any thoughts on just throwing out one from each category?

This week’s top tweet from @BeyondDC: @beyonddc Palin op/ed on cap/trade heavy on how Jesus wants us to drill oil, but doesnt mention word “carbon” even once. FAIL.

This week’s top tweet from the network: @T4AmericaOn a lighter note, will any of you be calling the classic, memorable, iconic Sears Tower by its new name, the Willis Tower? Didn’t think so.